Solving Humanity’s Greatest Problems

Can we do it with today’s public technologies?

The video of this post is here.

In Brian O’Leary’s final book, he surveyed conventional alternative energy sources and technologies and concluded that they were all too little and too late to solve our existential energy issues. Two that he discussed receive the most publicity today: solar and wind energy. When he wrote about it in 2009, photovoltaic solar and wind provided 0.3% of global energy use. Today, it is nearly 6% (less than 3% in the USA in 2024). That is quite a bit of progress in 16 years, and I decided that it was time to revisit the issue, partly spurred by Noam Chomsky’s mention of the New Green Deal and how easily humanity could solve the energy issue. I have seen numbers such as $50 trillion for the New Green Deal. Here is an estimate of $35 trillion for global renewable energy investment by 2030 to meet 2050 goals, so that global temperatures only increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. The difference between the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age was about one degree Fahrenheit.

In Brian’s last years, he sought a research assistant to crunch the numbers on conventional alternatives. I have never seen a definitive treatment of the issue, but my recent digging has found quite a few calculations, and I will discuss some of them. Here is an estimate that solar panels and wind power could satisfy humanity’s energy needs a hundred times over. I saw another statement of a thousand times over. Here is an article on how we have all of the materials for it. Here are pros and cons on renewable energy by source (and wind power (1)), which are similar to Brian’s discussion of the issue.

It is easy to understand the problems with fossil fuels. If we look at the nations with the world’s largest oil deposits, nearly all of them have played prominent roles in American foreign policy.

Number one, Venezuela, is under attack by the USA as I write this (the USA kidnapped the Venezuelan president and his wife days after I wrote this section, and Venezuelan oil will now get privatized, Iran- and Iraq-style). Next is Saudi Arabia, which always played ball with the USA, and its recent murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist has not dimmed the star of one of Earth’s most brutal regimes. Number three is Iran. We not only overthrew its government on behalf of American oil companies in 1953, but we also bombed it last year and Trump is threatening more as I write this. Number four is Canada, and Trump openly wants to annex it. Number five is Iraq: our generation-long genocide there will live in infamy, and our invasion is the crime of the century so far. Number six and seven are the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, which have always played ball with the USA, and we even “rescued” Kuwait from Iraq. Number eight is Russia, which we have been risking nuclear war with as we try to topple its government and Balkanize it, turning it into easily controlled vassal states. Number nine is the USA, and number 10 is Libya, which we destroyed in 2011. In short, oil dominates our foreign policy.

The world’s oil is running out fast and will be almost all gone in this century at current trajectories. Key questions are whether we have nuclear war over the last barrels of oil before we make parts of Earth uninhabitable from Global Warming and have epic crop failures in which billions of people starve, which I call the race of the catastrophes.

A key concept to understand the issue is known as “energy return on energy invested” (“EROI”). A century ago, East Texas oil had an EROI of 100, which meant that for every barrel of oil invested in oil extraction, 100 barrels were obtained. Oil EROI has been plummeting globally and will dip below seven before long, as the easy oil is gone. An EROI of seven is considered about the minimum to sustain a modern civilization.

All sorts of experts assert that conventional alternative energy can provide all of humanity’s energy. In 2013, a study concluded that when the costs needed to manage wind and solar’s intermittent energy are included, they both had EROIs below the threshold of economic viability, as seen below.

I dug around, looking for the numbers. Could wind and solar save the day? One of those cited experts discussed how heat pumps would be a huge help, but the best ones were wiped out. Maybe they can be resurrected.

I have looked into this issue regularly over the years, and I consider many renewable-energy presentations to be misleading. I have seen many graphs such as this one:

It shows the renewable share of global electricity production. It is the preferred presentation by most renewable advocates, but electricity is a small part of global energy use. If solar and wind are shown on a graphic of total global energy, they are barely distinguishable, such as here:

Here is a similarly misleading graphic by the World Economic Forum. Solar additions are far outstripping wind additions these days, and wind and solar are heavily promoted (1). Good old Amory Lovins is giving it his best. This past summer in Europe, solar produced more electricity than any other source. Fossil-fuel production was still rising in 2024.

My take is that if the entire world made an unprecedented effort, it might happen, but it will be far from easy with conventional alternatives.

Since jet fuel is about 50 times as energy-dense as electric-car batteries, electric planes are still novelties. There are no intercontinental electric plane flights yet. Over the total life cycle, electric cars save about a third of the energy over gasoline cars, and they do not produce carbon dioxide while running. One big issue will be scaling up the electric grids to replace fossil fuels, particularly for transportation.

For me, the surreal aspect of all of this is that if humanity goes this way, it may cost $100 trillion or more, and for $1 billion, which is one-hundred-thousandth (0.001%) of a global New Green Deal, we could have free-energy technology, and a new Epoch would dawn. We won’t get to a new Epoch with conventional alternative energy, as I discuss below.

The so-called net-zero plans promoted by elites (1) are widely regarded as fraudulent and just a new form of colonialism (but maybe it will turn out better for all of the world’s people).

I will now contrast conventional alternative energy with free energy and how each will address humanity’s greatest issues as I see them, which are:

1. Inequality – rich nations and poor nations – industrialized and agrarian, political and economic dictatorships, economic classes, and poverty-induced crime;

2. Warfare over resources, especially energy resources;

3. Humanity’s heavy ecological footprint, not only fossil fuels, but land use (mining, farming, deforestation, extinctions), pollution, roads, cities;

4. Cheap calories of poor nutritional value leading to degenerative diseases;

5. Elite suppression of technological advances and other racketeering;

6. Elite brainwashing of the masses;

7. Addictions that result from scarcity and fear.

I will discuss each in order, and this obviously assumes that technical efforts to overcome the intermittent nature of windmills and solar panels succeed in bringing their EROIs to civilization-sustaining levels.

Inequality: Humanity has lived in dramatic inequality since the first civilizations, and it is one of civilization’s greatest blights. The first civilizations conquered each other, and rising and falling empires characterized agrarian civilizations. Europe’s conquest of the world was a brutal enforcement of inequality, and industrialized nations have scarcely been better. After the recent American invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife, Sam Husseini reproduced his list of American interventions since World War II, as chronicled by the incomparable William Blum. The only way out of inequality is abundance. Can windmills and solar panels produce abundance? That is far from certain. All plans that I have seen for a world economy based on conventional alternative energy have been fairly austere. Peak Oilers argued for austerity. The net-zero plans are for global austerity, except for elites. As Azar Gat said, all violence is rooted in scarcity. If people live in poverty, there will be violence. It sure would be nice if conventional alternatives could deliver abundance and the end of inequality (which would end elites and all social classes), but I think that it would be a stretch, and the arrival of free energy easily solves the issue and much more.

Warfare over resources: This follows from the inequality issue. If some people have easy access to resources while others do not, it will lead to conflict. As Bucky Fuller said, making resources available to all of humanity is the only true solution, and politics cannot solve that. So, this is dependent on the same issue. Can conventional alternative energy make all resources abundant for humanity? Again, it is a stretch, and a distant second place to free energy and related technologies such as antigravity.

Humanity’s heavy ecological footprint: On this issue, it is again an issue of how much energy conventional alternative energy can deliver, but on this issue, it falls far behind what free energy and antigravity tech can do. With those technologies, Earth will never be mined again, as the solar system can provide material resources in amounts millions of times higher than what humanity can use. In what I call the Fifth Epoch, indoor farms can be placed anywhere in the solar system, managed by AI robotics, and they could feed humanity a million times over. Conventional alternative energy could also power indoor farms and eliminate the farming footprint on Earth’s ecosystems. For each one of these situations in which free energy could easily do it, the only way the conventional alternative energy could try to keep up is by putting up more windmills and solar panels. Maybe some of them have done it, but in the visions that I saw for what alternative energy could do, I didn’t see them bringing all of humanity up to the current American standard of living, for instance, and today’s American standard of living is far short of a world of abundance.

In order to bring humanity’s standard of living to something that approaches abundance, I would put it at five times the American standard of living, for starters. That likely means dozens of times more windmills and solar panels than is currently advocated. I also know that far more than free-energy and antigravity technologies are being kept sequestered from humanity. The global elite also possess exotic materials. In the Fifth Epoch, no life would be used to serve human needs such as wood, paper, and the like. Food would be it, it can be done quite symbiotically, and I expect that humanity would become vegetarian. Can traditional alternative energy deliver all of that? I strongly doubt it.

With free energy, it would also be easy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to bring it down to pre-industrial levels. Again, traditional alternative energy could accomplish it, but that means more windmills and solar panels.

Cities are energy-concentrating devices, and in the Fifth Epoch, cities as we know them will not exist. Once again, could conventional alternative energy make that feasible? I consider that highly unlikely. With the Fifth Epoch’s antigravity tech, there would be no more need for roads. Conventional alternative energy will not be able to deliver that, but it could eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. Because of the problems of batteries, I can see a lot more grid-like transportation, like electric trains, so roads could become part of the electric grid, to power the vehicles on them. That may be kind of an improvement.

Cheap calories: The human line began diverging from its ancestral diet when apes left the trees. More meat was part of that, as well as less fruit. Agriculture is largely based on seed crops, and to survive the seasons, humans began to preserve food, especially with the rise of agriculture. Those food-preservation practices result in food of poor nutritional quality, which has also led to our degenerative diseases, which is what kills most people in industrialized nations. Processed food is a killer. Humanity’s ideal diet should be mostly raw fruits and vegetables, and indoor farms solve that problem. Indoor farms help solve both humanity’s ecological footprint and health issues.

Elite meddling: I combined elite suppression of technological advances and the brainwashing of the public in this one. Unless conventional alternative energy can deliver abundance, which eliminates inequality and classes, there will still be elite control over humanity in ways that few people can scarcely imagine. If conventional alternative energy could deliver abundance and the end of the elites, then free-energy, antigravity, and other technologies would become publicly used and render all conventional alternative energy obsolete. Is a progression like that what humanity needs to do? We turn Earth’s surface into a hedgehog of windmills to soon dismantle them because they are no longer needed? I would rather skip the hedgehog stage.

Addictions: All addictive behaviors are an attempt to briefly escape from misery, which is born of scarcity and fear. If conventional alternative energy can eliminate scarcity and fear, then it can also eliminate addictive behaviors, just as the arrival of the Fifth Epoch would. The arrival of the Fifth Epoch makes it all happen much faster, however.

Summary: As I see it, conventional alternative energy is for people who do not understand that free-energy, antigravity, and other technologies are already on the planet and are older than I am. In 2023, I wrote a little story on what the first century of the Fifth Epoch can look like. Conventional alternative energy cannot deliver the Fifth Epoch. What it may be able to deliver is the promise of the Industrial Revolution, which would bring all of humanity to standards of living that were unimaginable only a few centuries ago. That will likely take another century or more, and it will fall far short of what I call the Fifth Epoch. The surreal part is that for 0.001% of the effort to turn Earth’s surface into a windmill hedgehog and solar-panel farm, humanity can initiate the Fifth Epoch. I know which alternative I prefer, and as I noted in my previous post and video, I seek the people who can also help pursue the Fifth Epoch. There are other advantages of the Fifth Epoch over a continuation of the Industrial Era with windmills and solar panels, but I believe that the above ones are among the most important.